Information Technology Services (ITS) started seeing an increase in reports of email messages being received in Washburn mail accounts with the following text:

This sender failed our fraud detection checks and may not be who they appear to be. Learn about spoofing (link to Microsoft site about spoofing).

The message typically goes directly to the Junk folder on the Office 365 Washburn email account. We believe the cause of this happening is that the sender is sending the message from another source (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) and setting their From address as their Washburn address. We are tracking this and will update if we discover additional information.

If you have your mail forwarded to another email address, we would suggest that when responding to those forwarded messages that the From address of the respective mail service is used. When setting the From address to your washburn.edu email address and sending from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc., this will cause the text above to display the notice to the recipient as listed above.

The change in seeing the new notice on messages sent in this manner is a change from Microsoft. It is not something we in ITS can control.

Any questions or concerns, please contact ITS User Services at 785-670-3000 or send email to support@washburn.edu.

It is important to maintain current software on University computers. To that end, we are planning to update all campus computers to Office 2016 for the fall 2017 semester. The look and feel of Office 2016 remain unchanged from version 2013 as the ribbon remained unchanged. There are new features and options available in 2016. A listing of what is new in 2016 can be found on the Microsoft web site.

Students, faculty, and staff that have obtained Office through the Office 365 (refer to instructions for installing Office on home computers) web site have already been running the newer version for a few months. The file format did not change between the 2013 or 2016 versions.

We do plan to have information to the campus so that faculty or staff that wish to go to Office 2016 in their offices prior to being pushed out to the campus can do so. We are finalizing those steps and will send a faculty/staff message with those steps once completed. This will allow faculty/staff to use Office 2016 in their offices prior to the cut over for the campus scheduled for fall 2017.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the campus going to Office 2016 for the fall 2017 semester, please contact ITS User Services at 785-670-3000 or by sending email to support@washburn.edu.

A reminder that Microsoft Office can be installed on up to five devices as long as you are an employee or student at Washburn. We previously posted directions on this process in December 2014 and wanted to provide another update on that process. The process remained the same although now faculty/staff do not need to validate prior to being able to download and install the software. The process is the same whether a student, faculty, or staff is accessing the site.

Log into Office 365.

In the upper right hand corner, click the Gear for Settings and Options.

Select Office 365 settings.

Select Software.

Click Installto install the software.

If you get a new computer or need to remove an installation, steps 1 – 3 apply above in order to remove an Office installation. Only this time, click Install Status on the left side of the screen. This will display those devices where you have installed Office. Click Deactivate to disable the Office installation on that specified computer (i.e. Home Computer).

Problems or questions, please contact ITS User Services at support@washburn.edu or by calling 785.670.3000. We can also assist you in Bennett Computer Center room 104 to install the Office suite.

I wanted to take a moment to remind everyone that ITS will never ask for your account information especially your password. If you are ever unsure about an email message, feel free to forward it to support@washburn.edu or call us at 785-670-3000. A message asking you to update your account information is spam.

By marking messages as junk (or blocking sender), this trains the email system to treat similar messages as junk in the future sending those directly to the Junk Email folder. This is true not only for your mailbox, but it helps others on campus also to send those messages to the junk folder campus wide.

A message that is obviously spam that is in your junk folder does not need to be forwarded to ITS. The message was flagged appropriately and went to the junk folder for the entire campus.

The past few weeks, we have seen an increase in spam. If the message is already in the junk folder, the message can be deleted or the junk folder emptied.

Marking a Message as Junk

A message that is in your inbox and that is spam, the best next step is for you to mark it as junk or block the sender. This can be done in Outlook Web and Outlook desktop clients. There are a few different methods to mark a message as spam, but for this post, we will keep the process short.

Locate the message in your message index.

Right click on the message.

Select

Outlook Web: Mark as Junk

PC Outlook: Junk > Block Sender

Outlook for Mac: Junk > Mark as Junk

The above will move the message to the Junk folder and train the email system to block those in the future.

If you are ever unsure about a message and whether it is junk, please feel free to forward it to support@washburn.edu.

Clutter and Messages in Clutter Folder

As a reminder, Clutter was enabled by Microsoft summer 2015. It is not something that we can turn off globally, but did want to remind you how you can turn it off if so desired. Please refer to the blog post from August 2015 (Microsoft Clutter Showing up on Washburn Email Accounts) to disable (or enable) Clutter. Note that messages that are moved to the Clutter folder are considered inbox messages. Thus, if a message is in the Clutter folder that is junk email, the same steps should be used to classify it as spam and no need to notify ITS support about the message.

Questions

We are here to help with any questions. We want you to be safe in doing your job. If there are any questions about messages, links, etc., please do not hesitate to contact us in ITS User Services. Our phone number is 785-670-3000 and email is support@washburn.edu.

We have corrected the problem with the hardware that was failing with MyWashburn. We were ready to put the solution into place on January 24, but ran into problems. Thus, the problem was resolved with new equipment on Sunday, January 31. During the time of working to install the new equipment we did not have MyWashburn go down since January 22. I had mentioned that once the problem was resolved, we would post a message to this site to let everyone know the problems have been corrected. I apologize for taking five days to post the notice that is was corrected. We wanted to make sure that no other problems were encountered.

System and Network Services were successful in configuring the new piece of equipment to control access to the affected systems. We have not had any reports of problems since Sunday, January 31 when the new equipment was installed.

Thank you for your patience while we worked through this equipment failure. Please let us know if you have any comments or questions by sending email to support@washburn.edu or posting in the comments section below.

The MyWashburn system was down for about 30 minutes this morning. The site, including D2L and Ellucian GO, are both back on-line and working again as of this update. We will continue to post updates regarding up or down status. Any questions, please contact us at support@washburn.edu.

The MyWashburn site has been operational since about mid-afternoon. We quickly restarted the system and it was back on-line by 3:15 pm today. I apologize for not posting an update once the site was operational. We continue work to rebuild the failing component. We are hopeful that the new equipment will be in place by Friday end of day or over the weekend.

Sorry for the delay in posting the update that the site was operational as of mid-afternoon. Any problems or questions, please contact us at support@washburn.edu.

We are seeing access problems and receiving reports of not being able to access MyWashburn, D2L, and Ellucian GO. This started about 2:40 pm this afternoon. We are aware of the access problem and working to get it on-line. We are continuing to work on a new hardware solution to fix this problem.

Once access has been restored, we will post an update to this website.

Access has been restored. Thank you for your patience while we work on this hardware problem. As we posted yesterday, we are still working on the problem, so possibility that access could go down again. Please continue to check this site for updates. We are working on building new hardware to fix the failed hardware. Once the systems are stable, we will post an update to this site and a notice to all faculty/staff.

Thank you for your continued patience while we work through this hardware troubleshooting.

Access to the MyWashburn sites are down as of 9:20 am this morning. As indicated in the update yesterday, the problem with the hardware will continue until we post that it has been resolved. Please watch this site for updates.